Wednesday, January 2, 2008

My father's wife makes him a cup of coffee every morning and brings it to him in bed. I used to think him terribly spoiled (she makes one for herself too), but now I find myself longing for the same treatment . Sigh...

For me, it's not quite so easy- Evani would never willingly bring me a cup of coffee in bed every morning. But Lucas often comes to wake me up, at 11 or so, and he's gotten big enough that I can send him on simple errands, like telling Ruan to bring me the coffee. Today the whole thing backfired, because Lucas wanted to be the coffee bearer, not just the messenger. I heard him start howling downstairs, and he came upstairs with Ruan, clinging to his shorts, as he brought the blessed coffee.

Obviously, getting the coffee in bed is no good if I don't get a nice 15 or 20 minutes to read my book in peace and drink it. Not happening with a screaming, crying two year old next to me. I tried everything to get him to calm down, and finally what worked was singing the elephant song from one of his favorite YouTube videos.

This afternoon I went out to pay a bill- it took about an hour. Don't ask me why it took me an hour to pay a bill, let it suffice to say that I live in Brazil. In Bahia. Bill paying, which eats up too many hours of my time every month, deserves its own entry and will get one.

As I sidled up to my computer, at 11:30 at night for the evening work session, I found a note by the keyboard from my very unhappy stepson. The fact that he wrote anything is notable- he doesn't like to write. I didn't let him go to his aunt's house because of an appointment we have with our educational psychologist. He wrote a long note telling us how unhappy he is and trapped he feels here in our house. Admittedly, he is on summer vacation and he hardly leaves the house, poor kid. This neighborhood isn't so great for him to hang out in the street, and the one friend he has on the next street over never visits anymore and vice versa- I'm not sure why.